The study of pragmatics deals with areas such as deixis, conversational implicature, presupposition and conversational structure. However, the study of second language pragmatics, also referred to as interlanguage pragmatics (ILP), focuses mainly on the investigation of speech acts, conversational structure and conversational implicature. These research topics have been addressed by comparative and acquisitional studies. While comparative studies are close to research on cross-cultural pragmatics, those conducted from an acquisitional perspective address developmental issues that affect learners' acquisition of pragmatics. In addition, interlanguage pragmatic research has traditionally divided linguistic knowledge from social knowledge. Leech (1983) and Thomas (1983) account for this fact by dividing pragmatics into two components: pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics . The former refers to the linguistic resources for conveying communicative acts and interpersonal meanings, whereas the latter refers to the social perceptions underlying participants' interpretation and performance of communicative acts. Hence, while dealing with pragmatics attention is paid to consider knowledge of the means to weaken or strengthen the force of an utterance (i.e. pragmalinguistic knowledge ) and knowledge of the particular means that are likely to be most successful for a given situation (i.e. sociopragmatic knowledge ).

In the field of language learning there has also been a tendency to consider Leech's (1983) and Thomas's (1983) division of pragmatics into pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics , but one has to accept that this has resulted in an unbalanced focus on the pragmalinguistic component. To date, most of the studies in the field of ILP present a partial view of learners' use of the target language, as either the sociopragmatic component is not taken into account or, when it is considered, general descriptions of the situational context are provided. From this perspective, most research studies have analysed routines and pragmalinguistic realisations (see Kasper & Rose, 2002; Rose & Kasper, 2001).